Tag: legal
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Novell wins copyright case against SCO
It seems that SCO’s litigation engine has been running for ever ( 7 years now ) and they exist only to litigate. But it appears that a jury-led decision agreeing with Novell being the rightful copyright holders of Unix, has finally put paid to any serious action by SCO. Perhaps we can all get on…
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Privacy and freedom: World Gone Mad Part 1
Last week, a story broke in the US concerning invasion of privacy and has become a huge talking point globally. The Lower Merion School District provided Apple Mac laptops to students ( no private machines were allowed ) and installed remote control software on these, allowing the school to remotely activate web-cams in an apparent…
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Australia and the net filter
The Australian government have gone public with their China-style Internet filter which includes the following measures: mandatory ISP-level filtering of Refused-Classification-rated content a grants program to encourage introduction of optional filtering by ISPs, to block additional content requested by households an expansion of an existing cyber-security program run by the government to improve education and…
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The OOXML gravy train continues
It seems that the Microsoft-dominated SC34/WG4 committee responsible for maintaining the ISO/IEC 29500 standard ( Microsoft’s submitted document format standard ) is now making changes outside the scope of the mandated rules, in a possible attempt at bringing the standard more in line with MS Office 2007. There is a clear delineation in the rules…
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Data loss for Sidekick users Part 3
Internetnews.com mentioned on the 16th October that the bulk of the data had been recovered: “Microsoft today reports it recovered the majority of lost customer data for Sidekick owners amid a flurry of lawsuits filed yesterday over the recent server failure caused a service outage and data loss.” This is not quite the truth: no…
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SCO’s Darl McBride terminated
Finally it seems that they’ve had enough of poor old Darl at SCO. Took them long enough but they’ve filed some paperwork with the SEC in the USA indicating as much.
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Microsoft, Word and the evil patent
Microsoft has been recently sued by i4i ( a Canadian developer of sgml software ) for patent infringement, specifically on a custom XML feature in Word. The damages so far amount to $290m which is a considerable amount. That though is not the big problem for Microsoft: the suit includes an injunction against Microsoft selling…
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Groklaw, Sys-Con Media and journalism
I’ve been a keen follower of Pamela Jones’ editorial on the SCO-IBM case for a number of years now, mainly because of the importance of the topic but also because of Pamela’s straightforward and factual journalism style. Whether or not this is her real persona has never been an issue with me because her facts…
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Great Wall of Aussie
The government-led project to block all sites deemed as inappropriate to children has continued with a number of interesting developments in the last few weeks. First Wikileaks listed the blocked site list on their website ( and were then duly blocked themselves!!! ). Now a group have hacked the Aus Classification Board’s website. For a…
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FSF files suit against Cisco
The Free Software Foundation has filed a law suit against Cisco for alleged breaches of copyright in, specifically, many Linksys products ( WRT-series comes to mind as having OSS software ). Apparently the 2 have been in discussions since 2003 but it appears that Cisco have gone into dormant mode as there are still apparently…
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Open Source software protected under copyright law
A recent US federal appeals court ruling ( which overrules a previous lower court ruling ), has indicated that open source software now has the same protection under copyright law as other content. It’s quite interesting that the Business Software Alliance ( BSA ), which in the past has been the watchdog for such commercial…
